


Seeding the Destruction

by gilead



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 05:34:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3107975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilead/pseuds/gilead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two women are being devoured by their own fires. Nights in the rookery prove that the Right Hand does not always know what the Left Hand is doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeding the Destruction

It has become a pattern. How such a thing has developed, Cassandra can hardly imagine.

On nights later than should be prudent, she finds Leliana occupied in the rookery, herself with missives and briefs in hand, and sometimes—grudgingly, but more frequently now—a dusty bottle of wine, or a pastry purloined from the kitchen.

They are not particularly close, not as the others believe, even for all the years they've been colleagues in name. Often a continent apart, they've exchanged sparse, terse and professional correspondences, only meeting when a matter was grave enough that both of the Divine's appendages had to be devoted to the task. Those were dark times; as is this.

There is a shared understanding between the two Hands of the Divine: of doing what must be done, of living with private burdens, of being replete of all but faith. Even the Maker's work casts shadows, and their prevailing duty seems to be to flounder in them.

This Leliana knows, and for all the questions, answers, explanations, or justifications that have been and have yet to be extracted from Cassandra, Leliana simply lets her be.

In the rookery, they work in silence, alone but together. The spymaster's lips twitch when Cassandra pours her a glass of vintage, or divides a piece of entirely too complicated cake. It seems wrong that all that unites them is their service, but her colleague's faculty in deception unsettles her on an instinctive level, like an animal recoiling from strange movements. Yet Leliana's unremitting presence is a balm, though not for any reason she can assign it.

Leliana knows this too, Cassandra is convinced.

They are of a stripe, and of one thing she is certain: these may very well be her last days, and she takes her comforts where she can.

Shortly after Haven, and after several weeks of silence, Leliana breaks their standoff-that-is-not-one with a book. “The work of an Orlesian dandy named Barthélémy Ulysse Flavien Paul Hisson III,” she adds, straight-faced, “he's not Varric, but is quite popular among certain Orlesian circles. Or so I hear. No promises.”

She accepts both the fact Leliana would know this about her and the book brusquely and without comment. Leliana seems indomitably pleased, and uncaps her inkwell animatedly. 

The candle burns down to a nub and Cassandra finds herself somehow without work, and not yet weary of the redhead's presence. She looks at the book, next to her left hand. She brushes the cover. She opens the book. She reads the first sentence, and looks up at the spymaster, a child with a hand in the jar.

Leliana has slipped away to the cages, and the light conveys through the bars like strokes across her back. A rook is perched on her arm, eating out the opposite hand. The expression on the Nightingale's face is not like one Cassandra has ever seen.

“Is the book not to your taste?” Her colleague asks, without sparing her a glance.

“It's fine,” Cassandra corrects immediately. She returns her wayward attention to the text. Not one word has registered, and she realizes Leliana hasn't heard the page turn.

“You're ashamed, but you refuse to allow anyone else to shame you for this diversion. Which is it?” 

“It's a weakness others would not hesitate to exploit... as you have no doubt heard.”

“You know it doesn't diminish you. Believe what you need to about yourself, but there is nothing to reconcile.” Leliana placidly strokes away a tuft of dishevelled feather on her messenger's miniscule head, as if twisting a blade.

Cassandra receives the impression that it is a game, but not a cruel one.

Wintersend is well underway when Cassandra abdicates a round of sparring with the Bull with a limp and a swollen lip. To her, it is a night like any other, and she ascends to the rookery from the deranged festivities. There is a fire high on the hearth and Leliana is seated before it, the goblet held to her lips not quite veiling the slow burn of amusement. The spymaster is flushed, but an unmistakable keenness persists in her regard of her arrival.

“I heard the troops enjoyed your performance dearly.”

“Don't start,” Cassandra warns, slumping indelicately into the conveniently placed seat adjacent the spymaster and loosening her breastplate.

“You know, you and the Bull aren't so different.”

Cassandra pauses over a buckle. “You are comparing me... and Iron Bull?”

“I meant in a very specific way. Suffering only seems to encourage you. You fight on impossibly harder. It's almost inhuman, though inspiring.”

“Inhuman,” Cassandra scoffs. “I am not a machine, though many would prefer that I be one.”

“I know. Yet you insist that is what people should see.” Undaunted, Leliana vacates a bottle of white wine into an empty goblet and extends it. “Here, it's still cold.”

“The Herald has her role. As do I.” Cassandra presses the cold metal rim of the vessel to her lip and a thought springs into the present. “We will not end the night with someone's smallclothes pinned to the battlements, will we?”

“Nothing will happen that you do not desire,” Leliana replies throatily.

Cassandra issues but a noise in the affirmative, suddenly struck by the image of a girl, ensconced in finery and twirling through an Orlesian ballroom, uttering the same phrase from the unforgiving grimace of a mask. “Do you miss the Game?” She queries, inexplicably chilled.

“You ask as if I can simply put it down. I'll never stop playing. It's my craft, and most will never know me outside of it.”

“And if you could, regardless?”

“Ideals, then?” The corners of Leliana's eyes crinkle patiently. “Yes, although I wouldn't know what would become of me. Some players never remove their masks, because they cannot bear to see what lies beneath... or because there is nothing.”

“I'd have a hard time believing that about you.”

“Don't you?” The redhead laughs breezily. “What do you know about me?”

“You deal in facts—and keep yours close—but men cannot keep their natures secret.”

“You can see mine?”

“Don't be so incredulous. It is not so easily concealed. You are not without a soul.” Cassandra speaks with an authority borne of the compulsions of her duty: to seek out corruption and crush it. To peer into the hearts of men with an indefatigable gaze and withstand it. But that they do not teach.

She gazes, and an impish smile ghosts past the spymaster's features.“Good, because I was wondering.” Leliana stands, and goes once again to her cages.

The night Cassandra finishes the Orlesian dandy's publication, she reaches the rookery ready to produce her opinion, but Leliana is simply not there. What she does produce is a moment of searing helplessness, an insufferably foreign sensation. She maligns habits for precisely this: their insidious way of softening the mind. 

In the next moment, any self-recrimination is forgotten. She hears a soft scuffle, draws her sword, and locates the source. Behind the desk, on the floor in front of the cages, Leliana cradles a dying bird like a newborn.

“Her name is Nounours,” the bowed head speaks.

“Of course it is,” Cassandra mutters, and restrains herself. “I'm sorry.”

“No, I am. Pardon me. It's just a bird.”

“You do not have to conceal what I try to.” She hangs her arms at her sides and approaches Leliana. There is always more at stake, she reminds herself. A deep breath, and she broaches the subject. “I've been told the mind can only withstand so many losses.”

“Look them all,” Leliana murmurs with unnerving detachment. “My lover, the Divine, my agents, my friends. It feels as if I've lost the light. I was so sure I walked in it.”

Burned by the very thing. It's an insuperable statement, the thread that only begins to unravel both Cassandra's ignorance of this woman, and their differences. 

Hitherto she has placed her own faith in the Seekers, in Regalyan, in the Divine, and the Herald—as if faith has become the shield too heavy to heft—or perhaps it was always meant to be shared. From whence she continues to curate her piousness she cannot name, and what she has perceived till now about its persistence seems wanting—if not enough to deliver the Left Hand, what good for the world. But it is for them—for Leliana—the breach tempts a darkness from which there is no rescue, and she is renewed in her exorcism of it all.

“I do not normally put into so many words what I feel.”

“No, you act.”

“Because all that evil requires to triumph is for the good to do nothing. By what sacrifice I do not know. In spite of that, I doubt myself,” Cassandra discloses haltingly. “Whether I am doing the right thing, forsaking the Chantry, abetting a figure whose name depends on who lives to tell the tale. I may be misled, a fool, but I believe all of us will arrive where we are meant to be.”

Cassandra has the creeping realization her ability to navigate a conversation so labyrinthine is coming to an end. Closing in, she steadies her hand on the spymaster's slight shoulder.

Leliana hums to the bird as it fades. The tune sparks some dim nostalgia, a spasm of unexpected desire: notions Cassandra has long forfeited to her crusade. When she can no longer abide it, Cassandra relieves Leliana of the body and swathes it in silk stamped with the Inquisition's eye.

“Come,” she urges, ever the woman of action, though not unkindly. “We will bury her under the Andraste's Grace in the gardens.”

Their funereal procession is a sight, should a witness be present. They drive their knees into the dirt and scratch out a shallow grave under Leliana's much-plucked Andraste's Grace. The clippings in the vase before the statuette to Andraste are always fresh, but Leliana prays there like a woman scorned. 

As she does now, sometime past midnight with the smell of cut grass bitter around them.

“We were the reflexes of someone, something greater than ourselves.” Curled into her prayer, the spymaster emits strangled, almost startled bark of laughter. “And we, the dismembered hands. Left to repossess ourselves without so much as absolution.”

The twists of this woman's mind befuddle her, but Cassandra has never dallied with truths.

“We share one hope. Hold that constant.”

“A constant.” The kneeling woman peruses her for a while, her face taking its colour from the torches. Then Leliana's lips are on hers—just a feathery graze, a taste—with a stroke along her flank. “That the Inquisition will never lack you for inward fire. A heart.”

It numbs her tongue, and a stronger negation dwindles away. “A small comfort, I'm sure,” Cassandra manages.

“Not if those are all we have.” Leliana's fingertips traverse her jaw, then the Nightingale is gone.

Cassandra feels lighter. She has forgotten her sword in the rookery. There is no need to retrieve it tonight, and she does not tire to think of her empty bed. Elsewhere, a cutthroat, ruthless bard names her nug Schmooples, plots assassinations, and enjoys ridiculous frippery like satin shoes and tiny cakes. She has no need to pretend she is some sort of incontrovertible truth, when someone else has the power to believe that she is.


End file.
